Hi all

I am working on a project where i need decently low poly charaters (humans, dressed in casual and office clothes); I use Cheetah3d and Blender as main software packages, and i export everything in fbx and send it to Unity3d, where the magic happens.

Now I am at the point where i do not have time to make these characters, rig them and export them with the bvh animations that i need to fbx; so I am planning to buy a char or 2.

So far I tried various stores like Mixamo (the models are good but you gotta buy their motions, while i wanna use my BVH files); axyz design (the models are not rigged in a way that cheetah can recognize, due the fact that they are rigged in motionbuilder format; while they don't even load in blender since they are fbx) and some found here and there as free models, but i cannot get anything that i can just modify briefly (like add variety to the textures to make them more different from the original models) and use for my project.

Is anyone aware of a store that sells models that works with Blender and Cheetah3d and that export nicely (after adding animations) to Unity3d? I know that there is turbosquid too, but their models are rarely made to be used in 3d engines, plus you cannot try them until you buy them, and is not my objective to get something that then i cannot use.

Thanks in advance!

Not sure about the trying before you buy but I find

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php  to be a good place to find what you need at a fair price.

Thanks for your reply!

Anything sold by Daz and Rendo is not optimized for being used in 3d engines; they work as props for poser but their topology and the poly count is not feasible for something that you can use in a game; plus their license does not allow the use of the geometry other than for animations or renders.

Daz has a different site that sells models (basically almost the same thing that you buy for 9 bucks is sold for 49; in some case is the exact same item without even beinc decimated or optimized); and you can use them for one or 2 projects max.....cost less to hire a guy in India or in the Philippines and let them do the work :)

I understand that can't have all that i want at a low price, but at the same time when i sell my work as programmer i do not use the catchline "if you want a good job you pay for it, because this is the standard price in the industry"; if it takes me 20 minutes i charge X, if it takes me 2 days i charge Y; but i never ask for hourly fee, since for me is much more a matter of getting what the customer want and get it done in a certain amount of time :)

Anyway, I'm looking online but I can't really see anything that says that it will work for sure; and I am not really in the mood to waste 120 bucks just to give a try, so any suggestion is more than welcome

on www.blendercookie.com they offered a freebie low poly mesh that worked with the human meta rig and could be sculpted to the normals mapping to make almost any character

it would take some work on your end but its a 100% free option to paying for subpar meshes that arent good enough to pass muster

i was once a programmer and know that the time is always an issue but the customer comes first which is why i got into 3d modeling   typicaly i do not model people just machines to simplify the process but ive been working more in sculptris and will say sculpting has gotten alot easier

Good advice cartoonjockey; indeed it takes a lot of work, and honestly i do not even know where to start from :)

I was considering the moodels from 3Drt, they seems pretty cheap and their example works fine in Cheetah (but not in blender so far, also because i am still learning blender so probaly could just be my inexperience); otherwise mixamo also has interesting models, but their animations are pricey if you plan to get more than a couple; and at that point i would prefer to get a set of characters like the ones from 3DRT.

I will try to get something working tomorrow and see how feasible is the solution that you mentioned (i have little time and little experience...so i am basically screwed lol)

I don't know if you did a good switch :) programming has very specific restriction so if the customer ask for an exe or dll that does A and B using C and D, you can't mess up too much, but when you are asked to make a model, there could be 100 things that a customer could or would change; so i see it as more stressful....but if you like it enjoy; i prefer much more to deal with quaternions and pointers instead than tris and normals :)